Salon has a great article that I really think vindicates points that I made here as well as here. The Democrats have three choices, the way I see it: start a Marxist revolution, merge with the Republicans overtly, or embrace a more libertarian philosophy and really mean it. I'm glad I'm not the only one thinking this.
Arianna Huffington:
Already there are those in the party convinced that, in the interest of expediency, Democrats need to put forth more "centrist" candidate -- i.e., Republican-lite candidates -- who can make inroads in the all-red middle of the country.Camille Paglia:I'm sorry to pour salt on raw wounds, but isn't that what Tom Daschle did? He even ran ads showing himself hugging the president! But South Dakotans refused to embrace this lily-livered tactic. Because, ultimately, copycat candidates fail in the way "me-too" brands do.
Democrats have got to go cold turkey on their tedious old rhetoric about the suffering masses in their World of Pain. The Democrats' condescending portraits of African-Americans and the poor are manipulative, patronizing and ultimately self-destructive. The humanistic vision of progressive liberal politics (which I subscribe to) needs to be projected in inspiring, poetic language.Ellen Willis:Democratic principles should not just be a litany of complaints, a fracturing of the body politic into pockets of greedy self-interest. This is an energetic, creative can-do nation: Democrats must celebrate independence and individualism (the spirit of the 1960s) and stop encouraging infantile dependence on the government.
...Progressives must do some serious soul-searching. Too often they are guilty of arrogance, insularity and sanctimony. They claim to speak for the common man but make few forays beyond their own affluent, upper-middle-class circles. There needs to be less preaching and more direct observation of social reality. America is evolving, and populism may be shifting to the Republican side.
On cultural issues, it's been a long time since the political opposition in this country really defended freedom, especially sexual freedom and religious freedom. When you read Tom Frank, he seems to see abortion as some kind of peculiar elite concern, but that flies in the face of history. Americans are deeply ambivalent on these kinds of questions, but a great deal of feminism has been absorbed into the culture. All Americans ever hear is the right-wing position. The left apologizes: "I think abortion is a terrible thing, but it should be legal."I think there is a possibility that freedom, individualism, and liberty could take root in what is left of the Democratic Party. The question now becomes whether their members are open minded enough to see that there is no future in pushing a statist agenda. The Republicans have been forced by circumstance - and a much more comprehensive philosophical bankruptcy - to become the party of big government. Can a true alternative reinvent itself in the face of the darkness to come? What we do now is clear - the question is whether the people whom the Slate article was addressing will consider it. Read this articleFor 30 or 35 years, the left -- using that term very broadly -- has pushed the idea that we have to soft-pedal these social issues. We have to preserve them in court, quietly, but without emphasizing them in the public arena. Religion is the classic example: In 2000, we had a conversation about whether it was appropriate for politicians to display their faith in public, when Al Gore and Joe Lieberman were trying to out-religion the Republicans. In 2004, that issue has gone much further to the right, and we talked about whether it was obligatory for them to display their faith. So we had the spectacle of John Kerry, and Howard Dean before him, struggling to talk about religion and seeming completely inauthentic. If one of them had simply said, "Part of religious freedom is being able to keep your beliefs private," maybe they could actually have gotten away with it.
The left needs to have a genuinely alternative vision that emphasizes freedom, that emphasizes democracy
In terms of foreign policy, as long as people are really anxious about the economy and about culture, that also reinforces their fear of terrorism. They become genuinely desperate, looking for someone to make us safe, instead of realizing we have to take control of destiny. The debacle of war wasn't enough to offset that, and neither the neoliberals or the left have a coherent foreign policy.
Kerry offered a realist, internationalist, neoliberal foreign policy, but against that Bush scores a lot of points by hooking into what is fundamentally a good impulse: the idea that our relationship to the world must be moral and ideological, not just realist. He channeled people's impulses that we should defend democracy, and that we should be for the freedom of others, into the idea that thoroughgoing militarism and triumphalism is the way to do it.
This has led to disaster, but the left, on the other hand, has copped out with a knee-jerk pacifist position. Islamic fundamentalism is a real threat, and it must be connected to the war against fundamentalism at home. Again, a solution in the realm of foreign policy involves connecting to cultural issues and not running away from them. As long as the left just says, "get out now" -- well, that might work in Iraq, I don't know, we may just end up abandoning them to a horrible civil war. But it's not much of a long-term policy.
So we need to realize that the Democratic Party is hopeless. And now that socialism has failed, we need a whole new framework of ideas, in which we recognize that economic and cultural issues are fundamentally intertwined. Moral and cultural issues are important to people; they're not just a distraction from real stuff. And right now only people's most conservative impulses are being fueled.
We can't be in a defensive posture all the time: "Let's protect Roe vs. Wade" is not enough. We need to defend freedom, which in recent years the left has not been willing or able to do. We've let the right define freedom. The left needs to have a genuinely alternative vision that emphasizes freedom, that emphasizes democracy.
